Chapter 11: 11 Unreal City, Part Four

In the hospital building, Angharad bothered Tsuyoshi and Zelko with her attention. Mostly Tsuyoshi, though he didn't seem to mind. He did something elaborate with her hair, while Zelko read a book in the corner, occasionally looking up to smirk at them. She liked bumping in on their domestic moments because it reminded her of home and constantly third-wheeling with all her coupled-up acquaintances.

She weaved her hands through the air as she weaved her stories for them, unable to keep her hands from moving with her mouth. "And then I discovered that she has three month's copies of my column, from the hard copy version of the magazine, stashed in her suitcase. Can you believe it? Secretly all this time, Tabitha has been a fan of me and never even known."

"A fan of you?" Zelko said. Out of the corner of her eye she could sort of see him dangling the book down with his finger as the bookmark, and tried to turn to see what it was.

Tsuyoshi turned her head straight back into place and hissed at her to keep still.

"Oh, right, yes, I have a secret identity as Katherine Gold, underage fashion and beauty journalist. I have a column in a magazine talking about eye-shadows and this season's silhouettes, and also a video blog where I do flat lays and don't show my face, and also..."

"What did I say about keeping still?" Tsuyoshi said, and moved her head again.

"Though, I guess, it's more like my actual identity is the secret identity. I was enrolled in school under the name Katherine and James kept trying to call me that in public. It was actually really weird. It's kind of freeing to just be me here. I don't really want to spend the rest of my life talking about eye-shadow."

"Who's James?" Zelko asked.

"Her creepy adult boyfriend that harassed her into accepting a date," Tsuyoshi said. "She told me about him, already. Boring."

"How old is he?" Zelko asked.

"Um, he's your age," she said.

"How old were you when he started hitting on you?" Zelko asked.

"Uh, I was fifteen."

"Where did you meet this creep?" Zelko asked.

"Oh, uh… He works at my father's company, in the sales department. He's apparently a genius at sales or something, I don't know. Whatever, I don't even listen to that stuff. I just like the robot stuff. I don't really care about selling them."

"There, done," Tsuyoshi said. He pushed one last pin into her hair and moved back, scraping his stool across the hospital floor with a horrid noise as he did.

She stood and looked at him. "Do I look pretty?"

"Always." Tsuyoshi winked. He looked especially cute, in his draping red sweater, with one of her flower hair pins pushed into his hair above the ear from when he'd let her treat him like a doll to style earlier. "But especially now."

Finally she could get a look at what Zelko was reading, though the cover was old and ragged. He noticed her looking at the book and put it down on a side table.

"It's The Shining. Classic literature. The library is full of old stuff like this," Zelko said.

"There's a library here?" she asked

"There's everything here," Tsuyoshi said. "But books are boring. We should do something fun before the good doctor finds another corpse for me to lift."

Zelko sighed and stood. "I'm going to go shoot something."

"Be nice," Tsuyoshi admonished.

"I am being nice." Zelko waved as he left the room.

"I'm not even going to ask what secret long-standing argument that's about," she said.

"Wise. It's very dull."

He fiddled with something at the top of her dress and she let his restless fingers do what he liked. What was the harm?

"We should dance," he said.

"Really? In here? And there's no music."

"Yes. A basic waltz." He moved her into position and tried to move her around the room. "My uncle taught ballroom dancing and this is all I learned."

"No jive? No quickstep?" She focused on his face and the simple steps seemed to happen naturally, without her input. Though they did bump into a chair.

"He kept trying to get me to go to classes by saying I could meet girls."

"Wow, he was really barking up the wrong tree."

"The only woman I ever danced with was my grandmother, and only at weddings."

"The only dance I've ever learned is the classic high school dance sway. You know, the one where you stand really stiff with your date and pretend you're not nervous and trying not to step on their feet."

"Oh, this one." He pulled her closer and they moved into a dance that was more like a slightly more exuberant hug. She put her arms around his neck and leaned against his shoulder, looking out the door at the quiet corridor as they moved. It was always so quiet here. So little of the noise of life. Some days it felt so quiet that her heart beat grew over-loud to compensate and she ran outside just to prove there were still other human beings in the world. Only the distant ambient hum of the barrier and nearly thirty people stretched over such a large space, with no trees swaying in the breeze, or breeze to sway them, or animals moving across the night. Nothing but this.

"Yeah, this one," she said, as they turned, so she could look at her friend's neatly made bed, a low mattress in a spare room of a creepy, almost-empty hospital.

"I'm going to teach Jin British Sign Language," she said, just to break the silence. "Apparently. I don't even know that much."

"You'll be able to keep secrets from everyone else here."

"Yeah, but I don't think there's anything secret I'd want to learn from him."

"I should teach you French," he whispered in her ear, "so you and I can keep secrets from Zelko."

"Really?"

"He can't speak French. I can't speak Croatian. He and I can keep any secrets from each other we like."

"I probably wouldn't be able to pronounce any of it. I have a speech impediment. It took me years of practise to hide it this well in English."

"Then teach me sign language," Tsuyoshi said. "Though it won't work in the dark."

You are reading story Sabotage Sequence at novel35.com

She let out a soft laugh, muffled by the wool of his sweater. No other sound but their footsteps, alone in the universe.

"Everyone has so many secrets," he said. She pretended not to listen.

*

"Okay," Tabitha said, early next day, after she dragged Angharad all the way to the cafeteria. Sophie and Josephine were there, too, picking at the remains of their breakfast and looking disturbingly eager. "I keep seeing you walking around with Jin. A secret romantic affair, perhaps?"

"Um, no," Angharad said. "Definitely no."

"Why not?" Sophie asked. "He is cute."

Tabitha leaned right into her, elbow on the table blocking her off from everyone else. "You're single. He's single. It's the natural assumption."

"No, it's not! And none of that is true."

"Ooh, does Jin have a girlfriend?" Sophie asked.

"Um, how would I know that? Whatever, the point is that I do, technically, have a boyfriend."

"But he's not here," Sophie said, drumming her hands on the table, dramatically.

"You said we were going to talk about testing the barrier," Josephine said.

"Jin is not my type," Angharad said, to Sophie, then turned to Tabitha, eyebrows raised, and said, "Okay?"

"Good," Tabitha said. "You can't trust boys from the Northern Constructed Territory. I only wanted to make sure you knew better."

"If we're not going to talk about the barrier, I'm going to work out," Josephine said. She stood, still licking the crumbled pastry from her fingers.

Angharad wanted to watch her walk away, but Tabitha's gaze was intense and her arms insistent.

"I thought they declared peace in the Created Territories," Angharad said.

Tabitha's mouth went thin, but her gaze was no less intense. "If by peace you mean we all got conquered by someone else, sure. But you can't declare peace in people's hearts quite so easily."

Angharad twisted round, so she could force Tabitha into a hug, made mildly uncomfortable by the hard plastic chairs. "I never thought of that! Oh my god, that must be so hard."

"I'm so glad you understand. It is a constant trial," Tabitha said.

I'll bet, Angharad thought. For you and Jin.

"Group hug!" Sophie squealed, and squashed them both.

But Angharad had already started to wonder what it meant that the portal accident had brought people from two sides of the same conflict to share a trap together.

*

She decided to ask Jin about it, the next time she saw him wandering up and down the length of the barrier, alone, hands in his pockets as he looked at nothing much.

"Hey," she said to catch his attention, though she was pretty sure he could hear her feet stepping on the pebbles from further away than a normal person could. "You don't think the accident brought people here from every portal in operation, do you?"

When he shook his head he looked kind of like a wet dog shaking water drops off. She bit her lip so she wouldn't laugh at it.

"Not a chance. There's a few private portals owned by the super wealthy, and I've never been able to access their records, but there's also eighteen public portals on the planet and four on the space colonies. Not all of them operate at once, but it would have to be more than you'd expect to dislodge this many people."

"But there were definitely people who died in the accident, right?" she asked.

"Sure. One craft nose-dived. There was no way anyone could have survived that flaming wreck," he said.

"And we can't be sure how many people are here, when there's that other dome. And portal travel is expensive."

He stared at her. "Are you trying to argue yourself out of this?"

"Just being thorough."

He straightened up, like he'd just realised he was hunched over and was worried someone would tell him off for it. "You weren't awake for the big crash. I was. There's no way that was everyone. I can take a rough guess at how many people are here and it's not enough to make sense if every portal redirected here. The expense of portal travel just means it was used for big evacuations and getting things safely to the space colonies. A lot of the world is at war or suffering from big natural disasters lately. Ask your friend Tsuyoshi about being evacuated from a war zone."

"Sure, okay. Asking that is totally not going to end badly for me." She crossed her arms and kicked a pebble. "You and Tabitha couldn't have been evacuated from the same place, right?"

"No. I was in Point Rosemary. I don't know where she was."

"So, if not all the portals redirected here – like, maybe some redirected elsewhere, or actually let people reach their destination, or some people are just stuck in the void forever – then maybe you and Tabitha were both brought here on purpose."

"Shut up."

"Like whatever person brought us here wanted to annoy both of you. And you told me about the bullets or whatever they are in the storage shed – maybe whoever it was wants us to hunt each other for its sadistic pleasure, or something."

"Then why is it keeping us alive? The food has to come from somewhere and we keep getting fed. What does that mean?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said. "But if that person, whoever it was, picked and chose who would come through, then maybe people like Neo were brought here to make the rest of us feel unsafe."

"Then why were you brought here?" he asked.

"Bad luck? Or, I don't know, maybe if you want to terrorise people, you have to have someone that's easy to terrorise. Whatever, I could be wrong." She wasn't the only person in Zapville whose ancestors had been herded into camps, but this time no guard had appeared to give anyone a justification.

"If you teach me to sign, I can ask Freya's opinion," he said.

"Yeah, I'm really just going to start with your name. Not anything fancy."

You can find story with these keywords: Sabotage Sequence, Read Sabotage Sequence, Sabotage Sequence novel, Sabotage Sequence book, Sabotage Sequence story, Sabotage Sequence full, Sabotage Sequence Latest Chapter